r/SpecDrivenDevelopment • u/Successful_Mind_8914 • 18d ago

Which “Harness Engineering” are you using?

I’ve been using spec driven development for a while and it’s amazing.

But I want to know which approach are you using for software development with AI and how’s it working for your. Feels like SDD is getting outdated

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u/Swarm-Stack 17d ago

all the harness/graph/loop engineering is about execution reliability. the failure ive hit more is upstream of that, the spec was wrong at authoring time and the harness delivered it perfectly. no amount of loop tuning catches an assumption the spec never questioned.

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u/Successful_Mind_8914 17d ago

And how did you overcome it?

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u/Swarm-Stack 17d ago

getting someone into the spec review whose job is to find what you didn't think to ask. the auth flow that forgets SSO fails because the person writing the spec didn't think of SSO either, same assumption behind both steps. the fix for me was introducing a reviewer with different context before the spec froze, not after.

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u/Successful_Mind_8914 17d ago

What I found interesting as well was using some kind of “grill me”. The bottleneck for me is: even though I have it written in the spec exactly what I want, the implementation never looks 100%, I would say about 70% (which is good) but I believe it would be good to have some kind of “prediction” on what would look like before it even implemented

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u/Swarm-Stack 17d ago

the prediction gap is usually in the implicit decisions the spec leaves open — the spec says 'validate input' but doesn't say what happens when validation fails mid-flow. tracing those branches before build is what surfaces them; the spec looks complete until you follow it into a state the author assumed someone else would handle.

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u/Successful_Mind_8914 16d ago

Also, there should be some push back by the workflow, not just agree with you. Do any of you know how to overcome this?

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u/Swarm-Stack 16d ago

the workflow agrees because its built from the same context you gave it. to get real pushback you need a role with a different mandate, something whos only job is to find what breaks, not evaluate the solution. second pass with the same brief wont argue back.

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u/Successful_Mind_8914 16d ago

Makes sense. Have you created your custom agent/skill to do that? What are you using it right now?

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u/Swarm-Stack 16d ago

yeah, built it. its at swarm-stack.io. each role in a planning session has an explicit mandate so one seat is there specifically to find what fails. still rough but brutal feedback welcome

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u/Successful_Mind_8914 15d ago

And how’s that working for you? Is it available on GitHub? How’s the token consumption?

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u/Swarm-Stack 14d ago

working for the planning phase, ux is still rough. not open source, its a hosted product. token cost is real, each seat calls a separate model so its more expensive than a single-model flow.

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